This Thursday (February 12th, 14:00 UTC), MC Brown
will give a MySQL University session on Using DTrace with MySQL. MC has been involved not
just with documenting DTrace but also with DTrace development;
see his recent blog post for details.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a
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you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using
for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice
streaming, chat, whiteboard, …

Next Tuesday (27th Jan), I’ll be speaking at the London
OpenSolaris User Group again. For those that follow the LOSUG
meetings, we normally the third thursday of the month, but due to
the overwhelming popularity of the event this month (more 100
registrations so far) we have had to push the event back to the
last Tuesday of the month.

This month, I’ll be talking about the DTrace probes that we have
added into MySQL and demonstrating their use and functionality.
Along the way I’ll also cover some of the internals of MySQL and
how it works (and how they relate to the DTrace probes we’ve
added), how to use the probes to analyze and diagnose your
queries, and how I’ve already used the DTrace probes to provide information up to the
Query Analysis functionality within …

This Thursday (December 18th), Martin "MC"
Brown will talk about using DTrace with MySQL. MC is the Solaris (and,
naturally, DTrace and ZFS) expert on the Sun Database Group
documentation team. He's helped the openSolaris team port MySQL
to openSolaris.

There have been plenty of blog entries and
writings about the MySQL Query Analyzer, for what I think are
good reasons. Labeling it a potential Killer App, causing many MySQL
users to become paying Sun customers, may be a daring thing.
However, the Query Analyzer might very well have what it takes.
The key benefit of it is that it identifies the source of
performance bottlenecks. In that sense, one could
perhaps instead call it a profiler, as it analyses the set
of all queries going on, as opposed to an individual one. One
person to whom I described it said “ah, so …

So it’s been a while since I’ve hit my blog, but I feel compelled
to respond to Baron’s post, and many of the other (perhaps
short sighted) criticisms out there against this new
functionality that we’ve been working on for so long.

Everybody seems to be saying that this functionality
should be implemented in the server, or that the
better way to do this is to use these patches which add
functionality to the logging that MySQL already
provides. Well guess what people - what does that give you, other
than some more details on you queries?

More I/O.

What’s bad on a database server?

More I/O.

Query Analyzer, whilst it does currently use a proxy to collect
the statistics, doesn’t hit your disk at all. Everything is
collected and aggregated in memory, it …

Currently I'm working hard to find and remove scalability
bottlenecks in the MySQL Server. MySQL was acquired by Sun
10 months ago by now. Many people have in blogs wondered
what
the impact has been from this acquisition. My personal
experience is that I now have a chance to work with Sun
experts in DBMS performance. As usual it takes time when
working on new challenges before the flow of inspiration
starts flowing. However I've seen this flow of inspiration
starting to come now, so the fruit of our joint work is
starting to bear fruit. I now have a much better
understanding
of MySQL Server performance than I used to have. I know
fairly
well where the bottlenecks are and I've started looking
into how they can be resolved.

Another interesting thing with Sun is the innovations they
have
done in a number of areas. One such area is DTrace. This is
a …

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